The End of Antifa? Part Two

In Part One, I took a broad look at the phenomenon of Antifa, attempting to describe in part the psychology of those who act in the name of “anti-fascism.” In Part II I’m looking in more detail at the tactics used by those who act under the label. There are major continuities with how repressive forces in many regimes operate—but Stasi operatives during the period 1950-1990 prove a particularly useful comparison, partly because so much informant behavior was voluntary, and because of the way in which communications and surveillance were used. I strongly recommend Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006’s film The Lives of Others for an insight into how this regime functioned. 

We all possess the capacity to be cruel, but there are those—and always have been—who enjoy punishing others rather more than others. Many people who wish to take out their resentment on others know that it is foolhardy to admit this, however, so seek to dignify their aggression by claiming to be acting in the name of the good. The idea that one is acting to prevent harm, or to punish the wicked, is enormously seductive. Participating in a mob brings a fleeting thrill. 

As Aldous Huxley put it: 

The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior “righteous indignation” — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

It’s very clear that if you wanted for whatever reason to target someone it is extremely easy to do so, particularly, as we have seen, in the age of the internet, when many have been online for years. The blurring of the boundaries between private and public have created an eerie kind of transparency, and online Antifa activists not only harvest whatever they can once someone has been marked out, many work behind the scenes to edit people’s Wikipedia pages, use bots and mobbing to deboost or mass report people on social media platforms. Antifa regard the destruction of others as a kind of sport, unleashing cruelty under the banner of progressive ideology. It doesn’t matter from their point of view what’s true, only whether something works to hurt “enemies.” 

One individual, “Travis Brown,” who worked for Twitter in 2015, pre-Elon Musk’s takeover, in 2022 received, as Wired  put it: “a grant from the Open Knowledge Foundation, a nonprofit, to build software that would enable him to trace the history of accounts engaging in disinformation and hate speech.” As one X user puts it: “Travis Brown used his time at Twitter to create a backdoor to access private information of countless anon accounts, creating a web of networks of thousands of us. He is funded by the German government’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research.”

There are plenty of journalists who simply act as Antifa activists—though perhaps their time has come. As Eoin Lenihan pointed out back in 2019 regarding Christopher Mathias (who has just recently lost his job): 

Mathias’ apparent modus operandi is to gather doxes of individuals whom Antifa or Antifa-friendly groups suspect of being right-wing extremists. He (or a colleague) at Huffington Post then reach out to the target’s employer asking for comment, leveraging the media outlet’s name to ensure the individual is called out. Then Mathias posts the doxes in his column while investigations are ongoing.

Fake campaigns, usually run by one or two people, abounded over the past decade. One example, TERFS Out of Art, which targeted multiple women in the art world (including me), host an anonymous link for “tip-offs” and in their mission statement state that: “When you reduce no-platforming or public calls for accountability to the possible consequence of someone losing work and by extension income, you are both centring the person in question and deflecting from the real purposes of public accountability.” And “[t]hose who we are exposing and calling out here have had opportunities for growth… This isn’t a rampage, this is the next step.” These groups are explicitly run to harass and smear individuals, attempt to lose people work (and in some cases succeed, such is the level of ambient fear induced by accusations of “TERF”, “transphobe”, “fascist”, “racist” and so on), and to make it clear that if you step out of line, you’re next.

Antifa activists often engage in a coercive framing, which implicitly suggests that all language is really a weapon of war, and that there is one narrative, which they seek to control. There is a blunt force literalism at work in many of the claims made about things other people have written: no one can ever have been joking, there can be no context, and no permissible defence. In this way, they enact the truth of the quote attributed to Cardinal Richelieu in the 17th century: “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” 

Antifa activists do not prove anything in their targeting of individuals beyond this point: all they are really saying is that we can do this to you if we like. It doesn’t matter if you are a reasonable person, innocent, have made a joke, or changed your mind, or put something badly: there are no mistakes, only proof of your mendacity, for which you must be punished by losing work and being socially ostracised. Individuals are tarred forever. Many institutions have failed colossally in their duty to stand up to bullying of this kind. 

We will surely look back—perhaps even now—and stare hard at the recent past before shaking our heads: people lost their jobs for saying that human beings can’t change sex? That children shouldn’t be coerced into thinking they can?  

While the technology might have changed, the mentality hasn’t. It’s easy to draw historical parallels with the witch hunts, and every other mobbing in human history. In Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins’ The Discovery of Witches from 1647, he claimed to be able to discern witches by evil marks on their bodies, which he claimed were teats for feeding imps. These marks, he claimed, would feel nothing when run through by sharp implements. Hopkins and his crew killed around 350 people, mostly women, in East Anglia and Essex using these “methods.” We might be shocked by the absurdity and violence involved, but today’s witchfinders are no less involved in searching for “devils’ marks” in those they have selected: the presupposition that someone is evil is asserted first, and evidence for the assertion is “found” afterwards to prove the original claim. There is nothing truth-seeking or scientific about these vigilantes. 

Under the Stasi, there were around 800,000 inoffizieller Mitarbeiter—unofficial collaborators. As Sonja Suß put it in her research, the Stasi called the people willing to work with them “good people” (gute Menschen). This should remind us of the progressive demands to “be kind” or just “be a good person” or “just be normal.” Zersetzung (decomposition) was a technique used by these volunteers to damage the mental health of people designated “subversive” to the regime. Stasi tactics involved, among other things: reputation-trashing by mixing truth with lies; exploiting individual weaknesses (addiction, etc.) to disrupt oppositional groups, the deliberate spreading of rumours and the use of anonymous, pseudonymous letters, phone calls, photographs—fake and real—to compromise and smear individuals. Antifa have engaged in all of these strategies in the internet age: and just as then, many people have suffered harassment, violence, ostracism, economic loss, mental collapse and suicide.  

So much of social life consists of social conformity: the ones letting you know you’ll be punished for saying the wrong thing are policing the boundaries of what is acceptable. One of the strangest aspects of this is that they may not even be fully aware of what they’re doing. As Luke Conway’s recent, research-based and useful Liberal Bullies: Inside the Mind of the Authoritarian Left describes: “Authoritarians of every ilk tend to be intellectually apathetic, show an obsession with misinformation, trade in principles for groups, and exhibit cognitive simplicity…[yet] the more authoritarian liberals are, the less they believe they are authoritarian.” This is part of what makes many of today’s enforcers so frightening: they are following orders while not even being aware of it. As Andrzej Łobaczewski, author of the vital Political Ponerology puts it (ponerology is the study of evil): “if an individual in a position of political power is a psychopath, he or she can create an epidemic of psychopathology in people who are not, essentially, psychopathic.” 

It is difficult to accept that such people even exist, which is a large part of how they manage to achieve power. Most people are well-meaning most of the time. The vast majority of people want to resolve the natural problems that arise from social life. Very few people pursue insane vendettas or stalk fellow citizens. Yet this minority exists, and many institutions in recent years have been duped and frightened by such people, many of whom have used the cover of “anti-fascism” to wage extra-judicial war on random targets. Antifa seeks to use a “good” cloak (and anyone who questions it must by definition be pro-fascist!) to mask unacceptable activity. They work on the streets and in the shadows, and they are not motivated by truth-seeking, fairness or openness. They don’t want dialogue, discussion, resolution or positive disagreement. They simply want to hurt people. 

We have just experienced what Łobaczewski calls a “pathocracy,” governance by a small number of pathological people over a larger, psychologically normal population. Pathocrats govern by fear. Their vision of the world and of other people is guided not by trust, good humor and the acceptance of the reality of the world, but by a need to control the narrative, and to garner admiration, and, in some cases, to enjoy the fear of others.

In the past week, though, something cheering happened. A young staffer in the new administration named Marko Elez had some old unpleasant social media posts raked up by a highly-motivated journalist. The man resigned. Musk ran a poll asking if people wanted the man reinstated. They did. JD Vance then tweeted: 

I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life. We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back. If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.

What is shocking about Vance’s post is its sheer reasonableness, its marked humanness. After a decade of miasmic fear, conjured up by bad actors, of weak institutions and manipulation at scale—finally, some common sense, and some Christian wisdom. Another word for Satan is “the accuser”—and this is what we have been up against for the best part of a decade. Denunciation and accusation, often based in envy and rivalry, are not going to leave humanity: but we can come to understand these mechanisms better, to see them in ourselves, and to recognise them in others, and to put a stop to them before they become destructive of individuals and social life as a whole. Antifa tactics should be recognised for what they are: targeted harassment. Rather than respond in panic we should be asking—who is saying this, and why? And then simply refuse to go along with it. Antifa’s power comes solely from fear, and fear, as every great political thinker knows, has a habit of changing sides.